Posts Tagged ‘Skyrim’

Falskaar is a folly. It really shouldn’t exist. It’s a ploy by a 19 year-old modder to prove to Bethesda that he can make something that rivals their DLC, but with a fraction of their resources. That’s a bold claim for an amateur to make. Can it be done? Skyrim‘s built for adventurers and sightseers, not just quest hunters. It’s a place as much as it is a game. Is Falskaar a place? I spent the morning playing it to find out. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim is basically the J. Jonah Jameson of RPS: I was handsomely making sweet news for you guys when he stormed into the forbidden RPS chatroom of mystery, slammed his fists on the desk with the rage that only an editor can muster, and demanded I find some mods. “It’s the weekend!”, he angrily typed. “If you don’t find at least three mods by the end of the day that the readers can play, you can go and beg VG247 forra job.” And then he stormed out, muttering about page impressions, tea, and robots. Luckily I’ve been on a bit of a modding binge of late, so I have a few interesting things for you. Do you have Arma 3 installed? That’s nice.Read the rest of this entry »

That Skyrimajigger, huh? Who’d have thought it’d ever catch on, what with all its burly men, dragons, viking imagery, and infinitely memeable sights and sounds? In an industry that prizes quiet, civil ruminations on modern issues and abhors such savage flights of fancy, the very notion was ludicrous from the get-go. And yet, somehow, for some reason, people ended up thinking it was OK. So Bethesda stuck around and churned out buttery dollops of DLC, even though it desperately wanted to move on to its next speculative installation about a world in which nuclear bombs were never used nor created, and you explore places like Washing D.C. while constantly remarking how normally proportioned all the roaches are. Now, however, Bethesda feels its next big thing demands every last bit of energy it can muster, so Skyrim’s a done deal. Next up, something completely unknown and shrouded in mystery but no seriously it’s probably Fallout 4.

If you’re anything like everyone else in the world, you’ve probably put at least 347,867 hours into Skyrim. Now you’re pressed up against the level cap, face like a grape about to burst against its impenetrable ice. Yours is the hardest life. But soon, you’ll never have to stop leveling ever again. In short, legendary levels will “effectively remove the overall level cap.” Also incoming: a new legendary difficulty mode to match. But how will it all work? Well, wouldn’t you like to know. And you can, but only if you’re capable of braving the notoriously merciless difficulty of the unforgiving realm beyond the break.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the DICE Summit is a place where a bunch of game developers congregate to say things. Lots of things. Promising things, important things, silly things. But these sorts of events tend to have a unifying thread running through them – something that stitches all the itsy-bitsy baby things into a mighty Thingzilla. This year, though, it was a bit strange. The conference’s main refrain was “So yeah, what’s next?” But the reply was a chorus of “Errr, I dunnos.” The future’s right around the corner, but is it bite-sized and lo-fi, biometric, entirely user-driven, mobile, console, open, closed, or something else entirely? On edge, is how I’d describe the general sentiment. Unsure. Well, except for when I spoke with Bethesda‘s Todd Howard. He didn’t seem particularly worried, in large part thanks to these here personal computing devices we’re so fond of.

I preemptively think I’m gonna be sick. Don’t get me wrong: there are few things in this world I want more than Oculus Rift virtual reality for my mad dash through Mirror’s Edge‘s theme park of parkour, but now that it’s probably going to happen, I realize that I should probably bid farewell to any lunches I’ve had in the past couple months. And who will I have to thank for my sudden bouts of violent nausea? Interestingly, it won’t be EA. Instead, a third-party toolset called Vireio Perception is primed to add Rift support to Mirror’s Edge and other older titles.

Bethesda have announced that Skyrim’s Dragonborn DLC will be available on PC early next year, following a gestation period on the MicroBox. The content is out shortly on the console of 360 exclusives so the internet will be full of details soon but a leak has already occurred in Bethesda’s dam. Apparently. There’s a great deal of plausible information, apparently courtesy of a beta tester, trapped like a fly in the interweb and if you so wish you can look peruse the info-spillage at The Outhousers forum where it first appeared. The bit about dragonbirth labour pains is particularly enlightening. The link contains a million spoilers, of course.

Bethesda still haven’t announced the big Skyrim expansion, Dragonborn, for PC. 360 owners are getting it on the 7th December, but for reasons that absolutely elude us, the PC is left unmentioned. What’s more frustrating is that this is normal for Bethesda. The chances are it will come to PC, and therefore your seeing the screenshots below will be a worthwhile whetting of your appetite. But they so far haven’t acknowledged even the possibility that the machine on which the Elder Scrolls games have thrived for decades will be graced by the extra content. Which is rather lame.

I know the setting of Skyrim is a broken world, tearing itself in apart in a civil war while giant death beasts roam the sky, but I’m waiting for a romantic comedy machinima set in Whiterun. There’s so much ‘war this and death that’ that it could use a little levity. The Siege Of Markarth is well made death this and war that, to be fair. 8 minutes of killing, but it also tells a story – I was captivated, as the assassin… hmmm, nope. You’ll have to watch to find out. I’m not going to be that guy and ruin it for you.Read the rest of this entry »

The British Academy Video Game Awards took place on Friday night and Portal 2 was awarded highest honours, taking home little gold faces not only for Best Game, but also for Story and Design. Congratulations to Valve, who by this point must be making plans to put up some new shelves of award-bearing load strength. The popular vote went to Battlefield 3, which also won awards for Online Multiplayer and Audio Achievement.

Okay, that’s a little bit dramatic, but “making cities a bit more accessible to thieves” is missing the flair that the Dovakhiin deserves, and while I won’t be moving mountains in this second Skyrim mod round-up, I will be shifting cities about a bit. This second shout of mods isn’t really about fixing things or adding to the world: it’s about building on what’s there, making the world nicer. I wouldn’t suggest you use all the mods listed here at the same time, as there’s bound to be come major incompatibilities when you start shifting major urban areas around, but it’s a useful, catch-all guide to bettering the existing game. If the grass isn’t greener on the other side, it soon will be.Read the rest of this entry »

Skyrim might not be broken, but it is a bit cracked. There’s never been an open-world that didn’t crumble at the edges of a simulation, and Bethesda’s Nord land is detailed with a fine filigree through its stony butt. Patches will help, and Bethesda have done a lot of good work to keep the game ticking along, but with all those dragons stomping around, sometimes backwards, the mud has been loosened. Thanks to Steam Workshop, the act of modding Skyrim is phenomenally easy: all you need to do is select a mod in the system’s list and it’ll be integrated into the game. There’s also a few from the venerable Skyrim Nexus as well. While we wait for both Bethesda or these guys to pack the mud back in place, there are a few tweaks you can make to the base game, gleaned from the Workshop’s finest fiddlers. They won’t be as fancy as adding monocles and top hats to mudcrabs – I’ll be getting to those in a later article – but they will strengthen Skyrim’s core and fix a few glaring errors and inconsistencies.Read the rest of this entry »

I keep meaning to write about how remarkable the Skyrim Steam Workshop is, but it seems everyone knows: since the launch last week, the workshop has served over two million mods to Steam users. To put that in perspective, that’s a gigaquad of proto-Peggles. I’m still going to write nice things about how you can basically build your own game with it, but only after I’m done watching Bethesda’s multi-part tutorial on how to use their Skyrim Creation Kit to make and bundle mods for the Workshop.Read the rest of this entry »